The silence drops between us, cut through with the warm, dry wind. A few steps behind me, Orion swings his head from the setting sun to the shadows of aqueducts off to our right, muttering something under his breath that I can’t make out.
“I say let’s blow it up,” Dani says suddenly, and when I look at her again, her eyes are narrowed, her expression hard with that simmering, familiar anger. “Worst-case scenario, we piss off the Heralds and they’ll come down from on high to punish us. At least then we’ll know for sure.”
I smile a little and look away, down at the alloy. “Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me, I haven’t blow anything up yet.”
I shake my head. “I meant for coming all this way. For sticking around.”
“Oh, that.” She waves me away, her tone light and teasing. “Eh, it’s not like I had anything else on my schedule. Plus, all those skyliner homesteads dropped on my house…”
A week ago, I would have let it go, but I don’t know what I’m walking toward and I want to stop being afraid of asking the questions that might have messy, emotional answers. “That’s not the only reason, though, is it?”
“I guess not.” One corner of her mouth curls upward in a half grin. “Truth is, I don’t really have anyone else. Somebody who gives a shit if I’m alive or dead. Somewhere along the way, you’vebecome the only family I have left anymore. And there’s not a lot we wouldn’t do for our family, right?”
I meet her eyes. “I’m sorry,” I say, and the words taste so strange because I’ve never before apologized for what the Butcher did. WhatIdid as the Butcher. “I’m sorry about Big Haul. And all your crew.”
She nods, swallowing hard. “I’m sorry, too. If I hadn’t set you up, maybe—”
“Don’t.” I know how the rest of that sentence will go—maybe Halle wouldn’t be dead—and I can’t hear it. I can’t. My rib cage is too fragile for those words; it’ll shatter if they’re spoken. “We were both just…”
“Surviving,” she finishes softly.
She’d said something similar, back in her lodgings. That we were all just pawns, using or getting used. And look where it got us. Look at what we left in our wake.
Surviving can’t be all that matters, Val.Halle’s voice, Halle’s words, ringing again through my head.
I don’t want to use anyone anymore. I don’t want every interaction I have to be a transaction. It can’t be that the only way to live is to take from someone else.
“I saw it in you,” Dani says after a minute. “A couple of months after we started working together.”
I raise an eyebrow at her. “Saw what?”
She waves a hand, gesturing to me and herself. “That similarity between us. I’d gone into the whole thing expecting you to just be some mindless, murdering monster. But then I came to pick you up for a job one night, and you were on the rooftop, crying. You tried to hide it, but there were tears all over your face.”
I suck in a breath. I remember that night. How embarrassed I’d been to have been caught. But also how nice it had felt when she’d put her hand on my shoulder and asked me what was wrong. “After I visited Mama in the chapel. First time I’d gone to see her since they found out she was a prophet and took her away.”
“Still can’t believe you actually told me about that. In that one, brief moment, you gave me this little piece of your heart, and it had all the same jagged edges that my pieces had.” She flashes me another grin, and then, after a beat, she adds in a much softer voice, “I kept hoping that it would happen again. That you would let me in.”
The words are surprisingly tentative, and there’s an expectation underneath them that I don’t know what to do with. It’s the same kind of expectation I heard in Orion’s voice back in that room above the dram shop, when he talked about us becoming something new. Is there a future where I could see myself wanting the same? With Dani and Orion both? To give in to that thread in my chest that tugs me toward them and let it crash all three of us together? I’m not sure. I’m scattered into too many pieces right now. It takes everything in me just to hold myself in this shape and not dissolve into the air.
Maybe in some distant tomorrow under a different sky.
I’m staring down at the ground, trying to come up with some kind of response, when Trinity’s song crowds into my mind, growing suddenly loud and discordant. I’d been following it almost instinctively as we walked, adjusting our path little by little, but now I stop short, throwing out an arm to keep Dani from going any farther.
She frowns at me, confused. “What’s wrong?”
I shake my head, unsure how to answer. The landscape in front of us looks exactly the same as it has for the past ten miles—flat alloy running off in all directions, the storm roiling overhead, the aqueducts off to our right, snaking northward.
Orion draws even with us, swinging his rucksack off his shoulders. “Something’s changed, hasn’t it? Something’s different?”
Tentatively, I put a hand out in front of me…
It stops abruptly. The air is as solid as metal.
Dani hisses in shock as I flatten my palm against it, the juxtaposition of the open landscape and the solidness under my fingers causing my brain some real problems.
Dani looks over at Orion, who’s dropped to his knees on the alloy with his kit open in front of him. “Orion, what is this? Because you don’t look at all surprised.”
